


love me like i'm not made of stone (five temporary homes skye had - and a permanent one)

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (this fic is also subtly anti-Grant Ward so be warned), (yeah i don't like nuns), Child Abuse, Childhood, Coulson is such an emotional anchor, Established Relationship, F/M, Foster Care, Gen, Made Up Background, Nuns, Orphanage, POV Skye, Skye gets her deserved happy ending, Skye's Past, Skye's life is hard, it's very implied but i'm warning it, you make your past your past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 09:03:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1812847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye knows her past is much more painful than most people's. But she is not going to let that fact determine her future.</p>
<p>(Written for Skye Week Day 4: Favourite Relationship)</p>
            </blockquote>





	love me like i'm not made of stone (five temporary homes skye had - and a permanent one)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This fic deals with sexual abuse to children. It's very implicit and very elliptical but still, you are warned.

**one**

She is nine and she tries again.

"Sue. Just Sue," she tells her new parents.

She is not Skye yet, but she already knows she sure as hell is not Mary Sue Poots.

She knows she shouldn't go around calling people "mom" and "dad", that's what landed in trouble the last time. She thinks that has to be it. She did everything else perfect. She could be more perfect, though, she can try harder. There's always something about yourself you can better, that's what the nuns are always saying. She's not sure she likes the nuns at all, but maybe this is good advice.

 

**two**

She is eleven and the house is full of noise.

Good noise. New brothers and sisters. This is the first time – she has been an only child before.

Her new parents are not rich and there are six kids in the house, before she arrives, there's generic brand cereals at the breakfast table and when they go grocery shopping the whole family goes, so they can bulk buy what they need and the kids can help out with the bags. Her new parents are kind of old but they have such an energy about them – well you'd have to. Even if they only had Julius – older than her, obsessed with running, going through new shoes at an alarming rate. The twins (they are not twins, but they have been in the house the longest and they show Mary Sue Poots the ropes) like to grab Julius' sneakers and put their fingers through the holes in their shoes, making it worse. He doesn't mind. They all laugh at the inside joke. The house has a porch which fills with moths at night, and a humble swing tire worn out by use.

She spends the most time with Julius and the twins, the months she spends in the three story noisy warm house. She shares a room with Tania, who tries to run away almost every week to go visit her biological father in Atlanta; she would wake up in the middle of the night (still disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings) and she would see Tania walking out of the door, shoes in her hand as to not make a sound, and putting her finger to her lips, securing her new foster sister's loyalty. In the morning everyone worries, of course, but it seems like there's a system in place – the call to the local police, sending the older children to look for her at the station, saving her meals for when she comes back even though she's never hungry when she comes back. Tania always comes back. She never tells her new roommate Mary Sue where she's been.

The two oldest kids, Tran and Marie, are too old to hang out with her and the twins. They are in high school. She wonders how high school is going to be for her. A part of her can't wait to grow up. A part of her wants to stay in this moment, in this house, with her brothers and sisters.

"You can have your own room when Tran leaves for college," her new foster father tells her. The small one at the end of the third floor. 

But she is afraid to think that far into the future.

This is around the time she gets shy.

This is around the time when the nuns start shifting the blame on to her. Sister Joan asked her what was wrong with her, that parents kept returning her to the orphanage. She's eleven and she didn't quite get that was a rethorical question. She tried to find an answer. She pays attention at school and she brushes her teeth every night. She never raises her voice to her parents or the nuns. She knows she moves too loud and talks too much, but she's working on it. The other nuns are less confrontational about it; they shake their heads and comment " _we've never had a case like this one_ " between themselves (but loud enough so the other kids can hear).

When she comes back (the twins cried but she didn't) the whispers of the nuns are not whispers anymore.

 

**three**

She's twelve and this is the first pair of Chuck Taylors she's ever had. She's seen them on tv and she knows girls like to draw on them with magic markers, make them their own. When her new foster mother gives them to her she is too afraid to put them on, in case she gets them dirty. She doesn't want to give her a reason to return her to the orphanage on the first day.

Paula is the best, though. She's not really a foster mother. She's a temporary safe home. Some people do that – they are willing to take children in for a while, until the system finds them another, permanent place. It's normally children at risk, or kids who haven't been asigned to an orphanage yet, kids straight out of whatever problem had made them orphans. She wonders how many children Paula has taken in before her. There are pictures of them all over the house.

Skye's never known anyone quite like her. She works part-time in the local community college, a secretarial job. Her house is full of books. She had never been into books before but that summer she reads the _Wizard of Oz_ and _Harry Potter_ , a book about the life of Gandhi, _Sophie's World_ , Mark Twain. Paula is fifty-three and divorced and she has a younger girlfriend, a woman who works at her office – this is a fact that she was very careful to hide from the nuns at the orphanage when she filled the application to take care of the girl for the summer. They weren't looking too closely, though, the nuns, they wanted to get rid of as many girls as they could for the summer, keep everything working with minimum staff.

"They told me not to call you Mary," the girlfriend says when she meets her, and the three of them order a pizza and watch movies every Friday night. 

It's the summer she learns to swim in the sea – she had never been to the sea before.

(It's the summer she decides she will find out what happened to her parents, someday)

But the summer ends and she has to go back to the orphanage.

"Can I keep my sneakers?" she asks Paula the day they say goodbye.

Paula hugs her tighter than she's ever been held, like she might never let go. "Of course you can keep them."

 

**four**

She's thirteen and three quarters, almost fourteen, and this is the richest house she's ever been in. And the coldest one. Maybe it's because it's that big, she reasons, maybe there are drafts or something. It takes her a while to see what it is about that house.

"You're getting pretty, Sue," her roommate Amalia (Mala to her closest friends) told her before leaving for her new home. She held Skye's face in her hands. She sounded worried. "You're gonna get burned. Old ladies don't like pretty girls in their houses"

"Why?" she asked.

Mala shook her head. "You be careful, Sue."

At first she thinks Mala was talking crap, also because Mala is always talking crap. The couple are very nice to her. And the house is amazing. She finally has everything: her own computer with wifi, videogames, there's even a pool – though it's winter so she doesn't get to use it. Her new foster father – Michael – talks about maybe installing a heating sister, _Does that sound cool, Mary?_ and she doesn't correct them because this looks like the dream home, she can go back to being Mary for all she cares.

She doesn't see the cracks in the foundation until it's too late. She's not supposed to, anyway. She's almost fourteen. She has dreamed about this place her whole life – she thinks she has hit the adoption jackpot.

They drive her to and from school every day. Her new foster mother packs her lunch every morning – and not just a sad sandwich and an apple, no, elaborated lunchboxes with little encouraging notes on post-its ( _I couldn't remember if you liked tuna. I packed 20 dollars for the cafeteria just in case_ ) that Skye never throws away. She doesn't have trouble catching up with the classes, she's a model student. 

Michael works from home and in the evenings he takes a break and plays videogames with her and inquires about her homework – she doesn't really need help with that but she lets him help. She's not exactly sure what Michael does for a living but apparently he's very successful at it; he tells her his wife works just because she likes going out of the house, they don't really need the money, he's got it covered (these are his exact words). He's tall and he dyes his hair black to hide the gray. He is so cool, Skye thinks, he doesn't get mad when she forgets to make her bed or when she leaves her backpack in the kitchen and he lets her stay until late at her computer even on school nights. He high-fives her when she brings her first, excellent exam marks home. Girls like Skye would normally roll their eyes at an adults' attempt to be _a friend_ like that but Michael is so nice to her that she can't begrudge him, can she.

It's perfect for a while. More perfect than she ever allowed herself to hope.

For a while.

Then she realizes what Mala meant.

The morning after the night Mary (and she swears it's Mary, stupid, weak Mary) cries herself to sleep, face against those perfect 100% organic cotton sheets, her new foster mother forgets to pack her lunch for the first time since she arrived.

There are no more encouraging messages on a post-it.

She stays in that cold house five weeks, and it's two weeks too long.

 

**five**

She can say this for the woman: she tries, she really does. She never gets drunk in front of Skye, and she never leaves her alone with her creepy boyfriend Curtis. The house is relatively clean. She doesn't have a room of her own but the sofa bed is big and comfortable. She has heard about foster parents like these: bottom of the lists, getting the kids no one else wants. This woman had only agreed to adopt her because of the government check – this much she knows.

She doesn't hate the woman, she really doesn't.

To tell the truth she's angrier at the nuns – they said okay to this, they thought this is as good as she could get, this is what Skye deserved. They signed her off to this kind of home.

Maybe they are not wrong, after all. Her grades at school have dropped since she came back from her last foster home, she is failing some classes, skipping the rest. She hangs out with the older girls at the orphanage, she starts shoplifting (though they never ever catch her). She knows she's a bad girl. She doesn't mind. She keeps messing things up and she can't see that it matters anymore.

It's okay, she spends most of her time out of the house, out in the street, anyway. Inner city life frightens her for the first couple of days, then she notices patterns, devises itineraries of safety, learns tricks of the trade. She survives and it's actually not that bad. She finds a 24-hour internet cafe close to the woman's house and she continues her informal education in computer science. She has this. She has the world at large, if she wants it- She wants it. She also has the first physical traces of her parents, stolen from the nuns' offices, her birth papers. The owners of the cafe end up accepting her as one of their regulars, end up looking out for the girl who seems like she has nowhere else to be.

She slips in and out of the house easily.

"You are a quiet little thing. Aren't you?" her foster mother says, a clear accusation.

She shrugs. She doesn't think they have exchanged more than a dozen words in all the time she's been here. But she knows that's not what the woman is asking. It would be too difficult to explain. And she has already decided she will never explain it to anyone.

After a while the boyfriend disappears, that's good. Some girls try to follow her home from school, curious to see how a "charity kid" lived. She leads them right to the door of the cyber cafe and they lose interest soon. She thinks things are a lot better than they could have been – even at fourteen she is not really interested in feeling sorry for herself, she is very interested in getting out.

One evening she comes back from the cafe, rather late. It's not like anyone is going to notice, she reasons. She finds her foster mother waiting for her on the couch, with all the lights of the house switched off, and an obvious smell of alcohol.

"Where have you been? I've been worried sick."

She just stands there, with her bag still on her shoulder, waiting for the woman to get tired or escalate things. She's learned it's better not to say anything in these cases. Eventually everyone leaves her alone if she just shuts up.

"Why don't you ever call me _mom_? You ingrate little–"

The woman starts sobbing, drunk and inconsolable.

Skye (she is not Skye yet, but getting there, her fake ID is just waiting for a new name) drops her bag on the floor and sits on the couch with her. She puts her arms around the woman's neck. She threads her hands through the blonde hair – she always thought it was really pretty.

"It's okay, mom. It's okay," she says, clumsily trying to draw soothing circles on the woman's back.

When the woman falls asleep Skye puts a blanket over her and wonders if it's okay to take the bedroom for herself.

The next morning she tries to make pancakes to surprise her foster mother before she wakes up. It doesn't really go that well, taste-wise.

"You cook like shit," the woman says, but she flashes a fond smile.

Skye doesn't hate this woman. The worst part is – she kind of loves her.

The worst part is – once more she's devastated when the social worker tells her she's going back to the orphanage, like it was the first fucking time (yes, she has started to swear, constantly, she doesn't care if the nuns catch her doing it). 

After last time she had promised herself no more of this feeling attached crap.

After this she decides no more foster homes.

She decides next time she's up for adoption she is just going to jump the fence of the orphanage. She's going to leave this place behind and never, ever come back.

 

 

**one**

She's twenty-five and she's not sure what she's doing.

She's not sure what she's doing because she has never had this before, this kind of life: she has a team, she has a mission, she has brothers and sisters in arms, she has purpose in life, she has herself, finally, she has _Skye_ , and she wakes up every morning with her arm around the waist of a person she loves. All of these happened so suddenly and none of these she ever calls _happiness_ , because she has worked far too hard for that.

She's been restless for two days. Since she found out.

She knows what she has to do – but she hesitates.

She knows the promise she made to herself when she was a kid – and she would hate to disappoint Mary, to disappoint _just Sue_ , to disappoint the girl who walked out and walked away. She wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for all those girls, for every iteration. She wouldn't have what Skye has now – and what Skye has now she wants to keep.

She asks for a couple of days off work.

The perks of sleeping with your boss is that he's probably going to say yes, she thinks to herself, pretend-flippant because she still doesn't know how to approach the change in status – though in all honesty he'd probably say yes anyway.

Coulson looks up from his desk.

"They are going to tear my old orphanage down," she tells him, surprised at how alien the words sound aloud. "I want to pay one last visit."

Coulson arches an eyebrow and he transitions from being her boss to being whatever he is to her now, to being the person she goes to bed with every night, the person she chose, to be by her side when the darkness comes. That's no explanation, no status, no declaration – but it's the best Skye can come up as she is now. That person knows what this means to Skye, even if her boss wouldn't. Except her boss would know, too.

"Take as much time as..." he trails off, studying her face.

She still feels awkward navigating this, this no-man's land, even though SHIELD doesn't have rules to be broken anymore, but it doesn't have a map for this either; she is still trying to figure out how to act professional when her all clothes have started smelling of him.

"Are you all right?" he asks.

Skye nods.

She's told him everything about her days in the orphanage. Everything about her various foster homes. Everything. To the last detail. It was hard and part of her didn't want Coulson to ever see her in that light. But it was fair. He had told her everything, all the difficult stuff in his life, even the things he knew could push her away. He had even told her about his father. And Skye wanted him to see her, the whole of her, even the sharp, rough edges.

And he knows what she feels about the orphanage. That there were days in which she had wanted to burn down the place, but that she knew that wouldn't have helped anybody, least of all herself.

"I'm okay," she tells him, fidgeting with the files on his desk. "But I think I should go there one last time. _Closure_ and all that crappy shrink stuff."

"Do you want me to –?"

"No." She doesn't let him finish his question because if he finishes his question of course she is going to say _yes_ because of course she wants him to come with her. But she needs to do this without him.

The perks of sleeping with her boss don't include her boss looking at her with this worried expression on his face. This is definitely not a perk. It sucks.

"I'll stay the night in town and visit the place on Sunday. I'll be back by the afternoon."

"Do you want me to make the travel arrangements?" he offers.

She shakes her head. "Already took care of it."

She moves fast, always has. Wonders if that unnerves him. Coulson twists his mouth in a way that is quietly humorous, quietly intimate.

"So you didn't really come to ask permission from your Director?"

No, she thinks. I came to inform my – 

She hesitates.

Coulson doesn't seem surprised, seems a tiny bit relieved to know what is going on. If anyone was going to notice how restless she's been it was always going to be him. It's kind of the point of him, really, the point of _them_.

The trip there passes in a blur. She insisted on making the arragements and she insists on travelling like she used to, before SHIELD, cheapest ticket, no matter how uncomfortable. It felt like it was important, that it meant something. Nondescript motel to spend the night in town. She doesn't go out. She stays in her room working at her laptop with the occasional break to get a soda from the vending machine. This is part of going back, too, and why she didn't want the one person who could make this shitty trip a lot less shitty here with her. It would have defeated the purpose. She needs to go back to this version of herself – alone in a motel room, eating unhealthy snacks and listening to the woes of the world on her computer. She needs to practice being this person again, because she hasn't in a long time.

She leaves early and decides to take a walk to the orphanage, not really knowing how long that's take – she remembers the night she left, how it seemed like years before she reached civilization – or if she'll remember the way.

She remembers the way.

It's not that far on the outskirts of town. Skye wonders why the night she run away she thought the journey was endless (she had imagined the whole orphanage would be looking for her, and the police, with dogs, like she had just made it out of Alcatraz – she was a pretty naive and imaginative fifteen year old and for a moment Skye, the Skye of today, feels a strange yearning for the night of her escape, for that girl).

The orphanage seems smaller than she remembers – even if she always felt trapped and asphyxiated there the place itself felt huge as a ruined kingdom.

There are no guards looking after the property, and there's not much to guard anymore. The bare bones. Skeleton is an accurate word. The place has been hollowed out like an animal. In a way it's easier for Skye to go back to the time she spent here, without the distractions of furniture and notice boards with the cafeteria menu for the week stuck to it. All the windows are broken and Skye remembers the years of wanting to throw stones.

She walks into the tv room, where she and the other girls spent most of their time. The bathrooms are full of rotting leaves blown in from the trees nearby. Here Skye learned how to be quick taking a shower, sharing with all the others – it would come so handy in later years.

She climbs the stairs to where her bedroom used to be, even though it's probably not safe, given the neglected state of the building. She remembers the names of every girl who used to share this room with her. The ones who had been given their names by the nuns were always Ann, Ellen, Sarah; the ones who came later, newly orphaned, old enough to know why they were here, were always Trish, Bonnie, Mariana. It's weird to see the walls of the room bare like this, Skye remembers the yellow, flower-patterned wallpaper as if she were seeing it right now.

She touches the side of the wall her bed used to be pressed against. 

"Hang in there, Sue," she whispers.

The nuns' bedroom were on the other wing, bigger and nicer, or at least that's how she remembers it. Her last years here Skye and other girls learned how to break into them using the fire door to the back patio. They didn't steal anything, mostly, they just found it funny to sneak around.

She thinks about going up to the roof, but it would be too nostalgic – she spent mainly _good times_ on that roof, there she was hanging out with the other girls, there she smoked her first cigarette, there she could look at the town nearby and image her escape into its anonymity.

She lingers in the kitchen for a while. It feels like she has been hours here, the whole morning, and maybe she has, she can't tell. She was expecting to feel something... _more_. There are bits of the old rage and the old impotence scattered along these hallways, but Skye had thought what she'd feel would be sharper, more solid. She wonders if all those years swallowing up her anger, pretending it didn't exist, have somehow dulled it. She wonders if something else is going on here.

Mainly she feels sad that they are going to tear all this down.

It was her home after all.

But she is not a nostalgic person so she kicks herself into gear and decides to take one last look at the backyard and just leave, go back to real life – the life she has fought so hard to choose.

She is not expecting Coulson to be waiting at the back entrance when she finishes looking around but somehow a part of her is not really surprised that he's come.

For a moment she doesn't understand the image, though. This man within these walls. Like the two irreconcilable halves of her life have met. She feels trapped in a surreal dream scene in a movie and like he's going to disappear if she blinks. There's something wrong with this picture. Him with his perfect tailored suits in this landscape, with the overgrown woods invading the corners of the building, with all of Skye's memories, messy and not neat at all, messy and still weighing her down even if she pretends they don't.

Then he sees her and from the distance he gives her a little smile. No, Skye realizes, there's nothing wrong with this picture.

They walk towards each other.

Her mouth hangs a bit open when she meets him, still surprised by his totallty unsurprising gesture.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your–" he says.

"You came for me."

She wraps her arms around his neck, pulling him into a hug. She holds him tightly in her arms. She holds on to things now. To people. She has decided to hold on to this. She buries her face into his neck for a moment, where the scent is strong and familiar. She feels Coulson's fingers running through her hair, his touch light as it always is, trying not to crowd her.

"Of course I came for you," he says, matter-of-factly, into her ear. Of course. She feels like an idiot. "I know _why_ you had to come here by yourself. But you don't have to go home alone."

She lets go of him, still touching her hands to his chest after the embrace is broken. She wants to see his eyes.

"Home," she repeats, a bit skeptical but willing to take the bait one more time in her life, even after all this time, running her fingers along the lapel of his suit.

She holds his face in her hands for a moment. Her fingers feel cold from being outside the whole morning and he's so bafflingly warm under her touch.

"If you need more time I can come back later," he tells her.

Skye shakes her head. She kisses him, slowly and softly, like she has all the time in the world, like they are not standing in the middle of one of her worst memories.

"I'm ready," she says. She is thinking about the team, thinking about May and Trip and Simmons and Fitz. She had always wanted brothers and sisters – she never thought she'd end up with _comrades_. She is thinking about the man by her side. She had always hoped for someone who would want her – she never thought she'd end up with a _partner_.

Yes, that's the word she was looking for a couple of days ago, in his office. It has taken Skye an eternity, but she's found it.

They walk out to the garden hand in hand.

They go around the building, taking in the ruined playgrounds.

"I thought I wanted to see this place torn down so badly. But I'm kind of sad now that it's really going to happen," she says. He nods. He lets her talk. "They took off the fence though, a couple of years after I left. I wish they had done that sooner. Would have made my great escape a lot easier. Have I shown you the scar?"

He nods again. She remembers it well, the night she told him the story – she made it sound heroic and hilarious and Coulson had dipped his head and kissed the tiny white trace on her thigh, kissed it lightly and appreciatively like an inside joke but Skye could tell he knew how hard it had been for her.

She sees the car behind the rotten orphanage gates.

"You brought Lola," Skye says, delighted.

He smirks at her. "Thought you'd enjoy that."

She laughs, and then she goes still, very serious. To the point where Coulson starts to look worried, letting go of her hand to look at her face.

These past few months hit her; the way they have spent every day trying to rebuild SHIELD and every night trying to rebuild themselves and, somehow, each other. Skye finds it fitting that it has led them here, to her old orphanage. To stuff Skye hadn't wanted to think about in a long time, years, until Coulson started unlocking it without even meaning to, detail by painful detail. At times she could almost resent him for that.

She touches her fingertips against the crook of his elbow.

"I love you, you know that. Right?" Coulson nods quietly. She smiles. "Wow. There was a time when I thought admitting something like that would bring on some kind of cataclysm. But that's not me anymore. I don't care, I'm going to hold on to every bit of happiness, just watch me."

She takes his hand in hers, to make the point, digging her fingertips into his palm.

"I was thinking maybe you'd let me help with that," he says.

"Remember what you told me when I started this with you?"

It was only a couple of months ago and feels like a million years. And yesterday. It could have just as easily been yesterday – the way they were discussing what to do with the people in the Index who had been left without protection, and the next minute she was kissing her boss, like there wasn't even a beat to miss between saving the world and falling in love. It could have happened a week ago or a week from now.

Coulson remembers. "I told you our days might be numbered. You didn't think it was a good argument."

"It wasn't!"

"I remember what _you_ told me."

" _Precisely_."

She grins against his mouth. His hands are careful at her hips, then her cheeks, her hair. There's a triumphant thought at the back of her head, something about making out with Coulson on these grounds, in this place where the nuns insisted on telling Skye so many times how she was never going to be loved. Well, she is loved. She might not know what the hell she is doing, but she knows that much. So she is not above feeling this petty satisfaction over all the predictions made about her, and she is not above deepening the kiss to prove a point, to herself, to the nuns, to the universe.

"Do we have to be somewhere soon?" she asks Coulson. Seeing Lola she guesses the plane is not far behind.

"I told the team we'd rendezvous with them at some point but no, we don't _have_ to be somewhere soon."

She laces her fingers with his once more.

"Let's take the long way home."

They leave the orphanage behind.

She leaves the orphanage behind.

Unlike the first time she walked out of here she no longer leaves the place in bitterness and pain and regret; useful as they were to her Skye doesn't have the time for any of those things anymore – she's too busy with love and hope and _future_.


End file.
